Bragr
Banned
Those "player guides" are valid and if people like that, perfectly fine. But it's not irrelevant if they are in-game or not. They tell you things as you explore, and they don't explain things beforehand through entire builds and sections of the game.Okay, then you must understand that a "cool system and core part of the game" is literally player-written guides? Whether they're in or out of the game is irrelevant, you need an internet connection to see both. "be wary of left" and "hidden path ahead" are the same as someone outside of the game telling you that a +25 sword does X damage. It's someone playing the game and imparting that knowledge to you so that you don't have to find out yourself.
If you wanna completely cut out every single social aspect of a game designed with it in mind, that's your prerogative, play how you like - but the reason your criticisms fall flat is because you made the choice to play in that very specific way, and calling a system designed around it "bad" just doesn't track. The rest of us are all looking up weapon tables online rather than burning through limited upgrade resources for this very reason, but the game DOES let you do that if you absolutely have to. It just doesn't benefit you in any way whatsoever to do so.
My bottom line is that when we start streamlining and condensing systems to make them more approachable, we might as well just remove them entirely. And when you remove one system entirely in the interest of making things simpler, you start removing more and more systems, and you lose what makes the game special in the first place. Take it from a very long time WoW player who saw the game transform from an RPG into a MOBA gradually over more than a decade, decisions that might seem impractical on the surface might actually serve to benefit the game overall.
Don't you see the irony in people using builds and guides so they can tolerate the game?
It's not about streamlining it or dumbing it down. Are we supposed to excuse every FromSoftware design decision because we are afraid they will streamline the entire game? do you think all their systems are perfect and should never be touched? of course not. It's valid to question some of the things in their games. That doesn't mean it's gonna turn into WoW. FromSoftware games should be judged like any other game, we can't just say that any change is automatically dumbing it down.